“The Autumn Effect” Cut by Cut

 
"WAKING UP"
"I'm waking up enduring my biggest fear love"

The reason I wrote “biggest fear” is because I have, like probably everyone in the world, experienced relationships that go wrong where you’ve become vulnerable and you’ve put yourself in this state where you’ve been taken advantage of. It’s a scary situation to go through and makes you not want to do it again.

"FAULT LINE"
"Innocence is ugly in the one who is guilty"

The song is about a relationship that was progressively growing worse. And the line “Innocence is ugly in the one who is guilty” is pretty much stating that we’re all born innocent, but it turns ugly and fades away.  When you’re the one that’s guilty of being the unfaithful one, your innocence is lost and so is the other person’s.

 
"THE RECIPE"
"Evil's in the stink of you/Rise and fall we decompose"

There’s a very phallic overtone to the song.  It’s about the desensitizing of your spirit as you allow yourself more and more to engage in sexual conduct with multiple people.

It sort of takes the love and the spiritual sense out of the equation to the point where it’s just animal instinct and doesn’t mean anything anymore.

 
"CAST IT OUT"
"Drunk on failures regrets/Letters of silence confess burdens within"

This one is a little more personal with the actual topic. It’s a reflection on what someone’s going through, their state of solitude and how the only person they have to confide in is themselves because no one’s there for them.

"This time you've tried/All that you can turning you red but I will not/Hide you through this/I want you to help"

“Wasteland” looks at someone who is being so consumed by addiction. It’s blatantly obvious that they’re trying to conceal this addiction from their loved ones. It’s almost a cry for help.

 

"SEASONS TO CYCLES"
"Seasons to cycles children to men/Mislead and misread"

This song deals with the disillusionment of watching your dreams come into conflict with reality. You start in the music world with so much hope and passion and then you discover there’s so much business to it. “Seasons to cycles” is an expression of time.  For us, it’s the time that we’re going through right now—the whole experience of growing from a child state into an adult state in the entertainment industry and understanding the whole machine behind it.

 

"HALF LIFE"
"A precious gift embedded deep within your skin/But parasitic pleasures are closer than kin"

I’m once again talking about a person who is allowing himself or herself to become so engulfed in addiction or just a negative lifestyle that they’ve jeopardized the natural gift they have and all the things that have been right in front of them. They’re on the brink of losing it because they’re only giving half of what they’re really capable of because the other half is too caught up with the pleasures of the world.

 

"THROUGH THE IRIS"
"Please understand me/that now where you're standing/Is closer than I'd hoped"

This once again is about the sort of skittishness of being back in that state of vulnerability. It’s the stage in love where you’re not quite sure of the direction things are headed.  At some point in a relationship you just have to pretty much make the decision if you’re going in headfirst or if you’re going to get completely out of it. And “closer than I’d hoped” means that the person’s gotten closer than I had hoped or expected.

 

"EMPIRES"
"Lives are connected to lasting obsessions that becomes possessions of waste/While buying the next new fashion that's fed to enslave this land of free"

In our culture we’re really caught up in what we want more so than what we need. I think we find ourselves buying more and depending on more substance and technologies than we ever have rather than just relying on ourselves. We’ve become so co-dependent on this plugged-in world. I do agree that technology is a great thing for mankind so we can grow and evolve, but there is a fine line where you still have to keep your own sense of integrity and know who you are and not get too caught up in it.

"PREY"
"All at a time/All in the same/Califormula/I've become prey"

That’s pretty much talking about how the industry stamps out music. They’re really, honestly, not concerned about your personal well-being.  They’re focused on how much money you can make them–it’s a business and that’s how it works for them.  They want you to create a ‘product’ that appeals to the public and one that will sell. I think when our band actually got caught up in industry expectations–and I’m pretty sure a lot of bands feel like this—we looked around and felt like, “they’re really trying to stamp out everything the same just to sell it.”  You certainly don’t want to march to the beat of the stamped-out entertainment.

 

"INSECTS"
"Love in time grows stagnant/The innocence we have lost/New grains of time will not rewind"

I take relationships seriously, and this song itself is about reaching the end with a certain someone.  Love in time will grow stagnant if you don’t do something about it.  I’ve seen people my age who are married with kids and they really look almost lifeless—like there’s no spark left—because they fell into a routine. The passion that they felt at the beginning of the relationship is dead in a sense because they let it die.  In every aspect of life we should always be striving to advance from where we are and where we need to go.

 

"PARALYZING KINGS"
"Tension made of razors/Dragging across you/The flushing of eyes/Couldn't cleanse your abrasions"

 I’m drawing here on an actual event that that I witnessed. It’s pretty much about a person who backstabs someone they’re close to. Everything that had hurt them in the past, they were now doing to someone else.  Beware of people like this…

 

"THE AUTUMN EFFECT"
"Kindly could you re-evaluate autumn's animated growth"

This song originally came from a really vivid dream I had.  I woke up and wrote the entire dream down in all the detail I could and then it became a painting/sculpture that is hanging on a wall in my house. So it started off as a dream and turned into a piece of art before turning into a song that ended up being the album title.  It’s a dream about a character with three other friends who are all experiencing this sort of limbo between Heaven and Hell. We were going through this very almost surreal, cartoon-looking world and everything was growing and animating around us.   It was really just an elaborate, crazy dream.